allthingslinguistic:An informal study of vowels of exclamations of disgust, pain, terror, disbelief,

allthingslinguistic:An informal study of vowels of exclamations of disgust, pain, terror, disbelief, and surprise, by Kayeon Yoo on the CamLangSci blog. Excerpt: I collected data from a total of 21 informants representing 12 languages: three for Korean, four for Chinese (two from the North, two from the South), two for Japanese, one for Cantonese, one for Vietnamese, two for English (one for British, one for American), two for French, one for German, one for Swedish, one for Greek, one for Bulgarian, and two for Polish. I made phonetic transcriptions of the informants demonstrating the sounds to me in person or by audio recordings. When this was difficult, I relied on self-reports. Most self-reports were from those who had received training in phonetics and I often asked follow-up questions to make sure the phonetic symbols chosen were appropriate. Finally, I observed each language directly myself, except Swedish and Greek, at least once. Putting aside tons of methodological limitations which still remain, here’s what I found.If you want to know which languages use which vowels, I’ve summarised that in the table at the end of the article. But for now, look at the diagrams below for the aggregated results from all 12 languages for each type of surprise. (If you don’t know how to read a vowel quadrilateral[2], see Endnote 2.) A small circle on a vowel quadrilateral represent a response containing a rounded vowel, and a small square represent a response with an unrounded vowel. I must say that the exact positions of the dots are rough impressionistic representations as I haven’t made any acoustic or articulatory measurements. The arrows indicate vowels consisting of more than one quality (which phoneticians call diphthongs, triphthongs, etc.), such as [aʊ] in house. Blue arrows show diphthongs and triphthongs which start with an unrounded vowel and end with a rounded vowel. The vowel in house would thus be marked with a blue arrow going from [a] to [ʊ] as in the diagram for pain. Yellow is for diphthongs and triphthongs going from an unrounded vowel to an unrounded vowel; white is for those from a rounded to an unrounded vowel; finally, purple is for those from a rounded to a rounded vowel. Multiple answers from the informants are all shown on the diagram, but when there were more than three identical answers, they weren’t marked more than three times for reasons of simplicity. The big square dot in ‘terror’ indicates that most answers were either [a] or [ɐ̞].Check out the whole thing, including more diagrams, and here’s a clickable IPA chart if you want to hear the vowels. -- source link
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